Fatigue is sometimes defined as “the awareness of a decreased capacity for physical and mental activity due to imbalance in the availability, utilization, and restoration of resources needed to perform activity”. It is a complex and subjective phenomenon often assessed through self-statement. The main symptoms of fatigue include one or more of the following: lack of energy, tiredness and sleepy, headache, dizziness, muscle weakness, slow response, poor judgment, depression, loss of appetite, decreased immunity and memory ability, trouble concentrating, compromised desire to initiate activities, etc. Fatigue occurs commonly in people of all walks of life while patients suffering from acute or chronic diseases often feel fatigue of various degrees. At the same time, healthy people could have symptoms of fatigue due to all kinds of causes, including
1. Deprived Sleep                Generally an adult requires 8 hours sleep everyday but many people cannot meet the requirement resulting in tiredness. This type of sleep deficiency usually happens under the following two circumstances: a) various practical reasons related to work, family and society. Too fast a pace of lifestyle of many people forced them to sleep less and less, failing to meet one's physiological requirement. In addition, people during some specific time could feel tiredness. For example, People looking after new-born babies or patients at night often do not have sound sleep; b) a more common cause of sleep deficiency mainly related to ageing. From quinquagenarian to elderly, people's body function undergo gradual degeneration which includes the slow change of the biological clock responsible for sleep. Around dusk, a drowsy feeling often crept over many elderly people, who also wake up before dawn, with increasing number of waking-ups during sleep, longer period of time required to fall asleep again and the duration of deep sleep, an important indicator for sleep quality, getting shorter and shorter. According to a research report by Harvard Medical School (Harvard Medical School Special Health Report <<Boosting Your Energy>>, Harvard Health Publications), the deep sleep time every night of 30 year old people is about 50% of that of 20 year old while that of 65 year old less than 20% with only 5% of deep sleep of whole sleep time. Lowered sleep quality resulted in insufficient energy and becoming more likely to feel fatigue.        
2. Too Little Exercise                Lacking of regular exercise for a long time or sitting every day for too long without much activity makes people easily feel tired soon after they start some physical activity.        
3. Imbalanced Diet                Some people are very susceptible to feeling of fatigue due to insufficient energy or malnutrition which may be a result of having only low sugar, low calorie food or overly picking on what to eat for such reasons as slimming, etc. Others have a habit of having high calorie food such as chocolate to supplement energy. This may produce a short burst of energy supply but the effect is likely to diminish very quickly resulting in increased feeling of fatigue.        
4. Bad Habit Such as Alcoholism                Alcohol inhibits nerve system making prolonged reaction time and also disturbs sleeping mode. Smoking or drinking caffeine containing drinks will have stimulating effect on nerve system causing insomnia leading to feeling of fatigue. Although many people keep those habits for temporal refreshing, the final result is to make them feel more of fatigue.        
5. Psychological Pressure                Abnormal mental state is one of the important causes of fatigue. It is now very common for people feel psychological pressure or stressed for work or family related reasons such as heavy work load, big change in job responsibility, bad working environment, no job security, illness, family misfortune, etc.        
6. Bad Working Environment                Bad working environment will increase the feeling of fatigue, such as mining area, plateau oxygen-deficient environment, work place too cold or too hot, too noisy or too quiet, no one to talk to, irregular shift, focusing doing the same thing repeatedly. etc. Fatigue could greatly disturb people's normal life and have massive negative impact on quality of life. Long-term fatigue could become a potential “killer” of health or even life. The main impacts of fatigue upon human physiology can be summarized as follows:        
(1) Inhibition on CNS Functions                Under the state of fatigue, the human CNS is likely to be underperforming due to the inhibited secretion of such neurotransmitters as serotonin, dopamine and acetylcholine, which will lead to slow response, poor judgment, muscle weakness and becoming distractive. If this happened to a driver at the wheel, the consequence could be very serious.        
(2) Compromised Immune System Functions                Immune system plays a defending role in our body. Under normal situation, it effectively protects us from the bad impact of harmful factors such as bacteria, virus or hazardous chemicals. However, if the immune function was compromised due to fatigue, the body's resistance to various hazardous factors will be weakened. A typical example is that people in fatigue become prone to upper respiratory tract infection. On the other hand, normal people will have their immunity decreased and some cell factors increased after acute virus or bacterial infection, causing increased feeling of fatigue. It can be seen that inhibited immune system could be either the cause or the consequence of fatigue. There for, an essential approach to combat fatigue is to regulate the immune is system and strengthen immunity.        
(3) Impact on Oxygen Supply by Blood System and Reducing Body Energy Supply                The decomposition of blood glucose in vivo will release energy. With sufficient oxygen it will decompose into CO2 and water, at the same time release large amount of energy. By contrast, insufficient supply of oxygen will lead to less energy released and a lot of toxic waste produced through the decomposition of glucose. Researches showed that in the state of fatigue, the amount of oxygen supplied to muscles was greatly reduced and the muscle was in effect in a state of oxygen deprivation. If the oxygen deprivation happened to heart muscle for a long time the consequence could be devastating. Furthermore, because other body activities also require oxygen it is essential to have a continuous supply of oxygen to all the tissues in order to maintain the normal vitality of all the systems of the body. Therefor increasing oxygen supply to tissues will help the energy supply to the body, which in turn will assist the recovery from fatigue and reduce the risk of becoming ill.        
In terms of combating fatigue there exist a number of approaches, including taking a holiday, finding an satisfactory job, regular exercise, changing to a better diet and sufficient sleep. However, because of certain objective reasons, the measures taken to combat fatigue had not brought about the expected effect for many people. Firstly, it's not easy for people to change their lifestyle or social role. How a person is to live his/her life has already been defined by the related realities such as duty at work, family responsibility, social interaction, financial situation, etc. Secondly, people with long term fatigue may have undergone certain physiological changes including disorder of nerves system and endocrine system, weakened immunity, abnormal blood system, digestion disorder, etc. When these happened, it would be difficult to rely solely on the self-repair function of the body to get things right. And at this stage, a very essential and significant intervention to be considered is the use of some effective, safe and natural health products to help individual system recover to normal.
“Adaptogen” medicine is now widely accepted in the western medical world as a type of products having anti-fatigue effect. The concept of “adaptogen” was first introduced in 1947 by a Russia scientist, Nikolai Lazarev. It referred to a group of natural botanical products which was believed to be able to help human body return to normal through assisting its non-specific defense function against pressure and stimulation. They were considered safe and non-toxic within normal dose range and could systematically adjust and regulate human body. The most striking difference between “adaptogen” medicine and other drugs lies in that the former is able to effectively balance the secretion of hormones and immune system through antagonizing the hyper-function and strengthening the hypo-function leading to enhanced immunity and reduced feeling of fatigue. Consequently, we can consider the use of adaptogen type of botanical products to improve the vitality and sleep quality of middle-aged and elderly people through adjusting, balancing and optimizing the hormone levels and immune system.
Foreign researchers speculated that adaptogen type of drugs worked in a similar way to the “qi tonifying” herbs in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). According to the theory of TCM, the feeling of fatigue, especially long term fatigue, is caused by “deficiency”, mostly “qi deficiency” or both “qi and yin deficiency”. “Qi deficiency” can lead to the accumulation of water, dampness and phlegm, blood stagnation, which will further result in the consumption of qi and yin, and causing insomnia at night and lack of energy on the day. In addition, with ageing both qi and blood system are getting weak, people are more likely to experience the symptoms of qi and yin deficiency, mainly manifested as insomnia and fatigue. TCM practitioners commonly treat those people with qi and yin tonifying herbs such as Lycium fruit together with other herbs of relevant property or function to adjust body system in order to improve sleep and reduce fatigue.
Rhodiola, Gynostemma and Lycium plants are commonly regarded as “adaptogen” herbs, which are also classified as having qi-tonifying property in Chinese Materia Medica. Individual herb extracts of the three are now marketed, respectively, as anti-fatigue products but with different “adaptogen” actions due to the different chemical constituents that each herb contains. For example, Rhodiola has renowned function of rectification for many body systems. Gynostemma showed significant sedative, hypnotic and analgesic actions and could effectively improve sleep while Lycium is a traditional anti-ageing tonic used to enhance physique and delay ageing. When combined, the 3 herbs will act with different mechanisms of action to achieve better anti-fatigue result and at the same time to reduce the amount of individual herbs required. This will also improve the safety profile of the finished product allowing for longer term use than those single herb products.
Most of the marketed single herb products mentioned above do not have safety and/or efficacy evaluation, or explicit quality standards to ensure the consistency of the products. By contrast, the inventors of the present invention carried out strict toxicological and clinical studies, which comprehensively demonstrated the clinical safety and efficacy of the product of the present invention. Furthermore, the inventors of the present invention established, through experimental studies, specific quality standards and manufacturing process to guarantee the stability and batch-to-batch consistency of the product. The pharmaceutical and clinical studies carried out also resulted in the determination of the safe and effective dose range of the product for human use in the field of anti-fatigue.